Lest Our Old Shoes Sit Easier Than Our New

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … When we were children we were proud of our new shoes / Our once-a-year shoes in situational poverty / Although we went barefootin’ most of the time / As long as the weather and parents allowed

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“Remarkably Like Any Other Place”

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … Life is a pilgrimage from cell to cell: / The bedroom of one’s childhood, the college dorm / The noisy barracks, merry in spite of all / Eighty conscript soldiers bunked out in rows

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Time is a Falling Leaf (Battery not Included)

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … A child and a puppy playing on the lawn / Tumbling through soft grass in the bliss of June / We joy in their celebration of life / Everything is new / Except that it isn’t

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Michael & Gianna

By Lyn Wilson … Gianna did not always understand jazz. / It had become popular during the war, / Sometimes chaotic, / Sometimes smooth and calming.

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The Pale Lady of the Well

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall …when outside at dusk with poetry and pipe / And a whisper of single-malt offered to the earth / Sometimes I seem to see visions proper to a Celt / And hear soft songs from the dawn of time

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The Saturday Morning Tee-Ball Hero

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … A little moppet scampers around the tee / Waving her plastic bat as a warrior’s sword / Or as a fairy-wand to magic the day / Her first-ever tee-ball lesson with Dad…

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Who Has Been Eating My Chair?

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … Lawn chairs are for lawn-sitting quite at our ease / Soft summer evenings with a book and a glass / With birds and squirrels chittering away / Merrily over their supper of chicken scratch

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Send Them Your Dawn, O Lord

We repudiate Putin and all his works / And all his pomps and all his engines of death / And all his malignant servile orcs / Who crucify humanity with lies

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Oh Mother of the Holy Offering

Oh mother of the Holy Offering / How patiently you wait for the light of day / In silence you bear your suffering / For you know death will not keep Him away

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The Shape of a Poem, the Shape of a Life

Yes, they are awkward, those poems written in shapes / But if God writes our lives as poetry / Limned and formed for our continuation / We ask that He shape us with clarity and charity

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Everybody Writes a Poem About the Moon

Everybody writes about the moon / Often trying to force a balky rhyme / Along the continuum of spoon and croon / Which just won’t fill the bill, the quill, or the time

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Wake Up, Back Yard!

Brave seedlings from last year’s sunflowers arise / Among the tiny wings of zinnia buds / And the pushy skunk cabbages who hang around / Like playground bullies who ought to go find jobs

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On the Consumption of Art

But we do not consume a work of art / Sometimes we almost seem to marry it / Joining art in a sacrament of love / Beyond the velvet ropes of ownership

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All Intelligence is Artificial

No, no, we are not banks of blinking lights / And random teletype-type taps and beeps / Like Patrick McGoohan’s educational General / Or George Jetson’s mainframe at Spacely Sprockets

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People of the Book

The Thought became Incarnate in Judaea / And thoughts become incarnate in the books we read / For thoughts are tabernacles of our hopes / Tents in the deserts of our wanderings

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On the Consumption of Art

An artist writes about the consumption of art / As if a painting, a poem, a video / A statue in the lobby of the medical center / Were a tin of meatballs and spaghetti

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For Jack On His Birthday

In the long ago I was reading a book / (And doubtless thinking many brilliant thoughts) / Sitting in my car outside Our Lady’s Church / Waiting for some old-lady meeting to end

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Memphian Lamentation

Let us instead look within our fatal selves / With every resentment validating the Fall of Man / With every snub murdering Abel again / With every lie sentencing Christ to death

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Tolkien’s Shelob the Spider

A poisonous lump of flesh in malignant repose / Her lair all befouled with scraps of souls / In life sought out with her multiplex eyes / Her Sauron-eyes – it was the hopes that died first

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